| Publication Overview 19th July 2006
In Wartime, Alistair Cooke Saw the Best and Worst of Americans
This book is a find, in two senses.
It was only after Alistair Cooke's death two years ago that his secretary discovered the unpublished manuscript of "Alistair Cooke's American Journey: Life on the Home Front in the Second World War."
How such a topical and highly worked text came to be mislaid at the time it was written we are not told, but no matter: It is a fine book whose belated publication lends it all the more impact, rather as old photographs never before seen can throw sudden new light on an entire era.
When America declared war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Cooke got himself some retread tires (any tires were a luxury) and journeyed from Washington, D.C., to New York by way of Florida, Texas, California, Illinois and New England. He wished to see for himself how the country was responding to President Roosevelt's call to arms. The book is a wartime production and Cooke of course was pro-American, but the propagandistic coating is thin.
The war brought out a lot of the best in the U.S. as well as something of the worst. Inevitably there was profiteering and strains on race relations, as economic migrants responded to labor shortages and communities were shaken up. But mostly what Cooke shows us is a kind of quotidian heroism as the country rolled up its sleeves and got on with the job. Much in evidence were the very American qualities of adaptability, mobility and technical ingenuity.
There was a good deal of pulling together by people who cannot have seen a lot of each other in normal life, from poor distillers of turpentine (who increased their production by 50 percent), to the California shipyard owner whose boast about launching a vessel a day earned Europe's derision. (By ingenious new methods of mass production, he did.)
The war economy brought benefits at many levels. The unemployed streamed to new plants, and here and there African- Americans got their first chance to break into the skilled work market. One man told Cooke he was only allowed in after paying off the American Federation of Labor - the first time he had ever been treated like a white man, he commented, and he hadn't enjoyed it.
Cooke has a way of making his points without moralizing or overstatement, as when he leaves no doubt about his distaste for the internment of Japanese-American citizens, while recounting conversations with Japanese admirers of fascism who wanted America to lose the war.
The boom conditions benefited everyone, Cooke reports, from small-ranch cattlemen to unattractive girls who found themselves objects of desire for bored servicemen quartered in the neighborhood. Well-heeled women took first-aid courses, causing Cooke to observe that there were too many amateur doctors around for public safety.
Alongside much incidental humor there are poignant details, such as the San Diego tattooist who noticed that whereas in the First World War soldiers had wanted the names of their girlfriends on their arms, now they just wanted the word "Mother".
If Cooke's famous "letters from America" were characterized by a kind of patrician artlessness - an American by adoption, he began life as an Englishman - the style here is frequently more literary than journalistic. The mixture works, providing reflections on the character and landscape of the country as well as a wartime snapshot of its people.
He is not blind to their deficiencies. In Southern youth he is struck by "a glazed animal indifference to ideas, humor, the sight of new faces, even the presence of roving soldiers." Los Angeles, he writes, had a tendency to thrust its feelings about the war at you as if they were a "precious and heroic commodity," and in New England he notes a conflict between self-conscious public progressivism regarding race and a private conviction that blacks coming North to find work were a nuisance.
Overall, however, this is a work of admiration. It is hard to think of a better moment to remind a generation steeped in a facile anti-Americanism that without that country's gigantic moral and material support, Europe - Britain included - might have found itself submerged for many a year under the Teutonic Taliban.
George Walden | 
